why anyone wants an "assault rifle"

and people wonder why I fear our government:

http://www.salon.com/2013/07/07/“wh...a_book_the_new_warrior_cop_is_out_of_control/

Sal Culosi is dead because he bet on a football game — but it wasn’t a bookie or a loan shark who killed him. His local government killed him, ostensibly to protect him from his gambling habit.

Several months earlier at a local bar, Fairfax County, Virginia, detective David Baucum overheard the thirty-eight-year-old optometrist and some friends wagering on a college football game. “To Sal, betting a few bills on the Redskins was a stress reliever, done among friends,” a friend of Culosi’s told me shortly after his death. “None of us single, successful professionals ever thought that betting fifty bucks or so on the Virginia–Virginia Tech football game was a crime worthy of investigation.” Baucum apparently did. After overhearing the men wagering, Baucum befriended Culosi as a cover to begin investigating him. During the next several months, he talked Culosi into raising the stakes of what Culosi thought were just more fun wagers between friends to make watching sports more interesting. Eventually Culosi and Baucum bet more than $2,000 in a single day. Under Virginia law, that was enough for police to charge Culosi with running a gambling operation. And that’s when they brought in the SWAT team.

On the night of January 24, 2006, Baucum called Culosi and arranged a time to drop by to collect his winnings. When Culosi, barefoot and clad in a T-shirt and jeans, stepped out of his house to meet the man he thought was a friend, the SWAT team began to move in. Seconds later, Det. Deval Bullock, who had been on duty since 4:00 AM and hadn’t slept in seventeen hours, fired a bullet that pierced Culosi’s heart.

Sal Culosi’s last words were to Baucum, the cop he thought was a friend: “Dude, what are you doing?”

In 2007 a Dallas SWAT team actually raided a Veterans of Foreign Wars outpost for hosting charity poker games. Players said the tactics were terrifying. One woman urinated on herself. When police raided a San Mateo, California, poker game in 2008, card players described cops storming the place “in full riot gear” and “with guns drawn.” The games had buy-ins ranging from $25 to $55. Under California law, the games were legal so long as no one took a “rake,” or a cut of the stakes. No one had, but police claimed the $5 the hosts charged players to buy refreshments qualified as a rake. In March 2007, a small army of local cops, ATF agents, National Guard troops, and a helicopter raided a poker game in Cary, North Carolina. They issued forty-one citations, all of them misdemeanors. A columnist at the Fayetteville Observer remarked, “They were there to play cards, not to foment rebellion. . . . wonder . . . what other minutiae, personal vices and petty crimes are occupying [the National Guard’s] time, and where they’re occupying it. . . . Until we get this sorted out, better not jaywalk. There could be a military helicopter overhead.”


Indeed, that’s exactly what happened to seventy-two-year-old Aaron Awtry in 2010. Awtry was hosting a poker tournament in his Greenville, South Carolina, home when police began breaking down the door with a battering ram. Awtry had begun carrying a gun after being robbed. Thinking he was about to be robbed again, he fired through the door, wounding Deputy Matthew May in both arms. The other officers opened fire into the building. Miraculously, only Awtry was hit. As he fell back into a hallway, other players reporting him asking, “Why didn’t you tell me it was the cops?” The raid team claimed they knocked and announced several times before putting ram to door, but other players said they heard no knock or announcement. When Awtry recovered, he was charged with attempted murder. As part of an agreement, he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five years in prison. Police had broken up Awtry’s games in the past. But on those occasions, they had knocked and waited, he had let them in peacefully, and he’d been given a $100 fine

But the mission creep hasn’t stopped at poker games. By the end of the 2000s, police departments were sending SWAT teams to enforce regulatory law. In August 2010, for example, a team of heavily armed Orange County, Florida, sheriff’s deputies raided several black-and Hispanic-owned barbershops in the Orlando area. More raids followed in September and October. The Orlando Sentinel reported that police held barbers and customers at gunpoint and put some in handcuffs, while they turned the shops inside out. The police raided a total of nine shops and arrested thirty-seven people.

By all appearances, these raids were drug sweeps. Shop owners told the Sentinel that police asked them where they were hiding illegal drugs and weapons. But in the end, thirty-four of the thirty-seven arrests were for “barbering without a license,” a misdemeanor for which only three people have ever served jail time in Florida.
The most disturbing aspect of the Orlando raids was that police didn’t even attempt to obtain a legal search warrant. They didn’t need to, because they conducted the raids in conjunction with the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation. Despite the guns and handcuffs, under Florida law these were licensure inspections, not criminal searches, so no warrants were necessary.

That such “administrative searches” have become an increasingly common way for police to get around the Fourth Amendment is bad enough. More disturbing is the amount of force they’re opting to use when they do. In the fall of 2010, police in New Haven, Connecticut, sent a SWAT team to a local bar to investigate reports of underage drinking. Patrons were lined up at gunpoint while cops confiscated cell phones and checked IDs. There have been similar underage drinking SWAT raids on college fraternities. The Atlanta City Council recently agreed to pay a $1 million settlement to the customers and employees of a gay nightclub after a heavy-handed police raid in which police lined up sixty-two people on the floor at gunpoint, searched for drugs, and checked for outstanding warrants and unpaid parking tickets. Police conducted the September 2009 raid after undercover vice cops claimed to have witnessed patrons and employees openly having sex at the club. But the police never obtained a search warrant. Instead, the raid was conducted under the guise of an alcohol inspection. Police made no drug arrests, but arrested eight employees for permit violations.

Federal appeals courts have upheld these “administrative searches” even when it seems obvious that the real intent was to look for criminal activity as long as the government can plausibly claim that the primary purpose of the search was regulatory. In the case of the Orlando raids, simply noting the arrests of thirty-four unlicensed barbers would be enough to meet the test
 
Joined
Jan 10, 2008
Messages
4,353
Location
Austin, TX
Now I KNOW why I prefer to live in Australia!!
 
Joined
Aug 31, 2006
Messages
12,806
Location
Australia
The ATF and DEA should definitely be reined in. The laws they "enforce" should be repealed as well. But the hypocrites in Congress are afraid of the bible thumpers that elected them.
 
Joined
Aug 18, 2008
Messages
15,679
Location
Studio City, CA
It's not just the 'bible thumpers' and you know it, or places like California and New York would have none of these laws. And its not just the ATF and DEA, the local cops as a whole are far more of a problem than either of those organizations.
 
Joined
Jan 10, 2008
Messages
4,353
Location
Austin, TX
Federal laws cannot be repealed at the state level. And yes it's mainly the bible thumpers that have stranglehold on the conservative base that actually prevents progress in these areas more than anything else.
 
Joined
Aug 18, 2008
Messages
15,679
Location
Studio City, CA
But New York and California still have their own laws that enforce that fall into the same realm.
 
Joined
Jan 10, 2008
Messages
4,353
Location
Austin, TX
What laws are you referring to? There are no laws against specific drugs or alcohol at the California state level that I am aware of.

FWIW your examples are a confusing mishmash of alligations regarding multiple types of laws. In any case, the DEA and the ATF are federal organizations that enforce federal laws. If it were really such a big thing, you'd think the laws would be repealed. But they are not because of the bible thumpers.
 
Joined
Aug 18, 2008
Messages
15,679
Location
Studio City, CA
Sure there are. Absenthe is banned in California, the drinking age is 21 (though pressure from the feds makes that a gray one) and the BAC limit is 0.08. Additionally, California has plenty of open-container and public intoxication ordinances like most states.

Here is a list of California state law about drugs:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_California

You can keep blaming the bible thumpers if you want, but you're ignoring the fact that bible thumpers don't control many states that have strict drug and alcohol policies. Those states could repeal their own laws on the subject, but they choose not to because support for these laws draws from both sides of the political fence, though often for different reasons.

The reason the state laws are important to the discussion of police abuse is that state and local police cannot arrest someone solely for violating a federal law. Now they certainly can turn someone over to the feds if what they did violates both or a federal offense becomes apparent during the course of another investigation. This is the reason Sheriff Joe in Arizona lost out on his attempts to clamp down on illegal immigration. He simply did not have jurisdication (and why Arizona tried to make their own law on it to grant that jurisdiction).
 
Joined
Jan 10, 2008
Messages
4,353
Location
Austin, TX
The fear of big government and having guns to protect yourself from them still looks ridiculous. A few over zealous cops don't justify assault weapons, and enabling massacres like Sandy Hook. This is the sort of crazy thinking that society needs protection from, not the other way around.
 
Joined
Aug 18, 2008
Messages
15,679
Location
Studio City, CA
The fear of big government and having guns to protect yourself from them still looks ridiculous. A few over zealous cops don't justify assault weapons, and enabling massacres like Sandy Hook. This is the sort of crazy thinking that society needs protection from, not the other way around.

If it were only a few over zealous cops, I would agree. It's not.
 
Joined
Jan 10, 2008
Messages
4,353
Location
Austin, TX
Do you have any proof of this? A few anecdotes or right wing "news" stories don't constitute proof.

Considering though that the biggest terrorist threat in the US is from anti-government extremists with guns, I would think having a good government strike team would be a good thing.
 
Joined
Aug 18, 2008
Messages
15,679
Location
Studio City, CA
Actually, since you're the one saying that he's wrong, the obigation of proof lies on you. Step up, big boy, and prove your point via documentation. I'll wait.
 
Joined
Oct 18, 2006
Messages
13,535
Location
Illinois, USA
Do you have any proof of this? A few anecdotes or right wing "news" stories don't constitute proof.

Considering though that the biggest terrorist threat in the US is from anti-government extremists with guns, I would think having a good government strike team would be a good thing.

CNN is far from right wing. It's nearly impossible to go more than two or three days with a story off some cop shooting an unnamed person, a raid going wrong and some innocent dying or some cop shooting a dog. It's gotten ridiculous.
 
Joined
Jan 10, 2008
Messages
4,353
Location
Austin, TX
It happened all the time before, always has in LA for as long as I've lived here. Just getting reported more because the demographic craves it, is what I think.
 
Joined
Aug 18, 2008
Messages
15,679
Location
Studio City, CA
I remember times where lefties made such claims and righties denied them. Fun to see it the other way around...
 
Joined
Dec 26, 2007
Messages
1,786
Joined
Oct 18, 2006
Messages
13,535
Location
Illinois, USA
My mountain biking group got "raided" once and threatened with "environmental terrorism" for doing trail maintenance on an old and established trail. Nothing happened to us as they just wanted to scare us but it stopped the volunteer trail maintenance cold for quite a few years.
 
Throughout history, how did "white" man take slaves?

If we are talking about "white" slavers taking "black" slaves, the answer is simple:

The whites bought black slaves from black slavemasters in Africa. The Western part of Africa has a long tradition in slavery, and almost all the kingdoms in the area back in the 19th century, and before, had large slave populations.

White people didn't hunt for slaves. They just bought them.
 
Joined
Sep 14, 2011
Messages
129
Back
Top Bottom